In writing class today, the students choose colors from a deck of discarded paint cardsfrom the home supply store—names as plain as pencil point, as rich as sacred soil. I tellthem to write a poem in which they make a home of the color. One student imagines ahouse of drizzle, another a home of quaking grass. There’s driftwood and cardboard andrecycled glass, the inbetween of tadpole green—everyone has their own color—a palewhite called hush, like a page on which nothing is written yet, and there’s daybreak andgateway gray, potter’s clay, everyone their own color, their own home.

My Irish teacher explains to us that in Irish a black man is a blue man, fir gorm, becausethe Irish for black man, fir dubh, means the devil. The sky tonight is dark blue, it getsdarker and darker. A light shines in the dark street like a sign, a kind of hush. I thinkabout the way we use light and dark, white and black, to mean good and evil, as if this isjust the way it is and not a set of boxes we put things in.

Maddy asks what her color means. She has chosen a color of plum, color ofbruise—framboise, it says, meaning raspberry. A poem starts to knock about in myhead, an incantation, almost, of sound—framboise, flamboyant, boys, laws, because.

My Irish teacher says that unlike other languages, Irish has no neutral gender, so allnouns and pronouns are either masculine or feminine, but the Irish word for girl, cailín,is a masculine noun.

Caleb says, one way of thinking is that some people are red, and others are blue, andeveryone understands this, but sometimes we come across someone who is purple.Purple, Caleb says, can be perceived as a mix of red and blue, but it’s really a color onits own. A color like framboise, or daybreak, or hush.

David chooses lotus, his card a pale pink. I describe the lotus flower, its links withrebirth and awakening, the way that it emerges from the pond’s muck, breaks thesurface, transcends the mud and water to flower

In the Victorian language of flowers, lotus meant forgetfulness, or sometimes noweloquence. I think of a candle, a hush, a page with no words yet. The sky tonight ispencil point. Our skin is potter’s clay. In Japan, there are lotus viewing parties, so many flowers achieving enlightenment at the same moment, it is said, you can hear the blooms crack open. I think of a pond filled with blossoms, or a crowd of people holding candlesat a vigil, or a room filled with students, moving on, lifting themselves, lifting us.

About Ed Madden

Ed Madden's poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, the Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is the also the author of four books of poetry, most recently Ark (Sibling Rivalry, 2016), a memoir in poetry about helping care for his dying father. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is the director of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina. His TedX talk about caring for his father appears here.